Wordscapist: The Myth (The Way of the Word Book 1)

by Arpan Panicker

  He gave me a rueful smile. “You do not waste much time, do you? I just got back from the scape and here you are, ready to nail my arse.”

  “I have been waiting a long time, Silvus. I can’t begin to tell you just how much pleasure this brings me.”

  Silvus gave me a long, thoughtful look. I could almost see the thoughts leap in and out of that brilliant but twisted mind. He was trying to figure out how to deal with me. Given the corner he had painted himself into, he didn’t have too many options. The question was, would he dare?

  “I’m afraid I can’t come with you, Amra. There are things to be done.” He said this in a matter-of-fact way, as if he were telling me that he could not make it for a lunch date. I tensed a bit as I tightened my grip on the quirt. He was way too self-assured, way more than his usual irritating levels. Something was up.

  “Lucky for me I came prepared, Silvus.” I kept my voice matter-of-fact too, stepping closer. I felt him tense, anticipating my move. Quickly, before he could try any of his tricks, I twirled my quirt to stop right under his chin and flicked the safety off.

  He arched his head back, straining to keep his neck away from my quirt. He knew what it could do. Good! “Wait, I need to show you something,” his voice was a wee bit strained from his thick neck being stretched out, but he was still lacking the tension I was looking for. Definitely suspicious. “I promise, Amra, I won’t make trouble. But I really need you to see this.”

  He sounded sincere. But then, he was the Mastersmith. He could sound like my grandmother, and wouldn’t even need a scape for that. But he was waving a peace flag, and that was rare enough to make me wonder. I was not sure if he was stalling or whether he really had a rabbit hole woven out. I did not say anything, but moved the quirt marginally so that he could move without getting his throat crushed with a power surge. I saw his massive frame relax a bit. Good, I did have him worried. I needed him a lot more than worried though.

  He closed his eyes and seemed to be thinking to himself. “Thoughtscape!” the idea crossed my head. No, even the Mastersmith couldn’t pull that off! I tightened my grip on the quirt nevertheless. Suddenly I heard a sharp crack, and almost reflexively shoved the quirt forward. I saw movement to my left and turned, moving to cover this new threat. There was a demon standing there, freshly teleported in, but definitely not freshly dead. It was a body-snatcher, and the corpse was way past its expiry. The thing was disgusting, half rotten and falling apart at the seams. It also had patches of what looked like glass that had half melted into its skin. I could not help wondering why the body-snatcher was still clinging on to this ruin of a corpse. That is when the thought struck me full-force, “Silvus has summoned a demon in front of me, a CCC officer!” I knew then that he had gone completely crazy. I flicked my quirt back from the demon to the Mastersmith. I knew which monster was more dangerous. The pattern of the glass shards and the damage they had wreaked on the body looked vaguely familiar. I put the thought away for a later time. Taking on a rogue wordsmith and a demon at the same time required complete attention.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Silvus barked at the demon, ignoring me or the threat of the quirt. It was so tempting to take him out then and there. But no, I’d waited so long. I’d wait some more.

  The demon tried saying something that ended up sounding like stomach-churning slobbering. I saw that part of its jaw was missing and it could not really talk. I still could not get over the fact that Silvus had actually summoned a demon and was acknowledging that he had it working for him by having a conversation with it. He was drilling holes in his leaky boat, hoping that the water would run out!

  Silvus made a disgusted sound and stared at the demon, no doubt lambasting it telepathically. At a gesture from him, the demon leaned forward and touched the orb. The orb glowed a faint green. Silvus apparently wanted the demon to transfer some information or memories to the orb. I was getting impatient, and you know what they say about keeping a woman waiting. “If you are done with your hoodoo, we really should be going. And yes, please tell the demon that it is under arrest too. Or perhaps I should execute it right here.”

  “Patience, Amra. And you shall be rewarded. You are after all chasing the most powerful wordsmith in the world.” He said this with an almost absent-minded grimace, which could have been an attempt at a grin, still staring deep into the smoky crystal.

  I could not believe the man’s arrogance. But I was willing to give him that much in his last free moments. I nodded my head with a slight smirk to let him know what I really thought of him.

  “Then I’m afraid you are at the wrong place. A few hours ago, a scape was loosed that ended up with an anonymous wordsmith, in all probability a cipher. The scape captured the essence of the legend that we wordsmiths call the Wordscapist. Somewhere in this world, there is a Wordscapist.”

  “A Wordscapist?” I could not believe the bullshit he was trying. “You think you can weave a fairy tale to skip out of this one, Silvus?”

  Silvus had never been a patient one, and I could see a flicker of annoyance in his eyes. “Amra, do you think we’d weave a scape that almost hit a 200 on the CM just to toast some marshmallows? It was the biggest scape ever, and it was an attempt to create the Wordscapist. But then, it went wrong. If it had not, we would not be having this conversation. I would have been out there, changing the way the Guild, and even the CCC works.”

  There it was again, that limitless arrogance. This man really knew how to get under a woman’s skin. The story sounded incredible. But then, Silvus was capable of anything. “You are saying this Wordscapist scape you tried got lost and ended up somewhere with a cipher. What happened?” I spoke slowly, like I would to a kid. A delusional, powerful, dangerous kid.

  “Sign attacked. She killed Sau as a warning and set the rest of the team on hunting down the person the scape ends up with,” he spoke coldly, without emotion. He stopped, his eyes glazing over slightly. He recovered soon enough, and went back to staring manically at the orb. “I do not have a choice, Amra. I have to obey Sign or she will hunt me down, no matter where I am.”

  I clenched my teeth, trying not to react impulsively. Sign! If one looked at it objectively, Sign did what the CCC did. She kept Continuum meddling under control, though her methods were a lot more direct. However, there was only one Continuum supervisory body and that was the CCC. That made Sign nothing more than a vigilante, elemental or not. And vigilantism was not something I appreciated. But what was weird about the story was the fact that Silvus was working for Sign. “Since when did the Mastersmith allow the Guild’s nemesis to give him orders?” I asked the question, not bothering to tone down the sarcasm, my quirt still ready to take whatever he might throw at me.

  Silvus chose to ignore my question. His eyes had widened a bit at whatever he was seeing in the damned orb. He should not have ignored me. There are a lot of things that piss me off, but being ignored definitely was at the top of the list, along with other irritants like someone trying to kill me and someone trying to bullshit me with legends of a Wordscapist. I flicked my quirt and brought it down on the orb with a sharp crack. There was a hiss from the demon as my quirt made contact, followed by the sound of expensive glass shattering into a thousand pieces.

  For a fleeting moment, the Mastersmith showed a surge of rage on his face. I was ready for reprisal as I whipped my quirt right back to his throat. He took a moment to recover as pieces of glass skittered over the period rosewood desk to fling themselves into the plush depths of the carpet. “That was unnecessary, Amra,” he fixed me with those dead eyes of his, “I was going to give you my undivided attention the moment I was done going through this creature’s report. It was of some relevance to our conversation.”

  “Silvus, I am done with your games.” I said, my voice harsh and my teeth still clenched, the quirt almost quivering for release an inch from his throat. “I am here to arrest you, and I am not going to wait in queue to do so. You will come with me right now, or I am going to st
un you and get my team to carry you out on a stretcher. Those are your options. Pick!”

  “Amra, Amra, Amra. Such temper…”

  I did not wait for the condescending bastard to finish and shoved my quirt at his throat, primed for a debilitating blow. Silvus was ready though, and my quirt froze where it was, an inch of his throat, stuck fast in some kind of a scape shield. I immediately sent out a mental alarm to my team.

  “Amra, listen to me. Give me five minutes and I will explain. You are making a big mistake!” There was a slight strain in Silvus’s voice as he struggled to maintain the shield that kept my quirt from his throat.

  “Your time is over, Anton Javier Silversmith.” My words came almost on cue, as three of my team members burst through the door, followed by five more. All of them had their weapons at ready. We were taking Silvus down, and my announcement of his identity had been a declaration of intent. The name ‘Anton Silversmith’ had an extremely long CCC record attached to it. He had been listed as a cipher, a wordsmith outside the Guild. Once the connection between Anton Silversmith and AJ Silvus had been made, everything else had fallen into place.

  I could see the shock on Silvus’s face on hearing the name he had gone to such lengths to bury. He knew the game was up. He was flanked by two CCC operatives on either side, all of them armed and ready to shoot him in the head. There were four more who were flanking the demon, ready to take down the creature should it make any threatening movements. Silvus shook his head slightly, probably in a signal to the demon not to try anything. I pulled my quirt back and pulled out an electronic leash to slip around his thick neck. I walked around the table, gesturing to my team members to move aside, pulling the leash apart as I leaned over to put it on him. I saw his lips move as he said a word. The air seemed to warp as whatever he tried struggled and then died out. Realisation dawned on his face.

  With a few movements of my quirt, I had set in place a perfunctory scape-freeze the moment I got in. And I had woven it right around the Mastersmith, with my inane-looking threatening gestures. In his arrogance, Silvus had failed to realise that the quirt was much more than a taser designed to shock wordsmiths into mute submission. I smiled at his expression and reached around him to clasp the leash closed. The leash was not long enough to encircle his thick neck, further thickened by the force-field he had woven all around his body. I moved the leash around to readjust the link. And while I did this, I was not watching Silvus. Big mistake.

  The word he said blew open the force field he had around him. Said within the constraints of the force-field, it managed to escape the scape-freeze I had set. The entire force-field exploded, throwing me and everyone else in the room against the walls and the furniture. In the extended time warp before I hit the wall, I could see Silvus smile at me as he used the warp to say several words, mostly under his breath. As the warp formed, I realised that the freeze had been breached.

  A moment later, I hit the padded wall and landed hard on the carpet. Almost immediately I heard the sharp crack of a teleport. By the time I had picked myself up, Silvus was gone. He had found the precious five seconds he needed to get his arse out of there. I looked around and saw the demon on the floor, bits of gristle dribbling down the wall it had hit during the explosion. My team were picking themselves up too, weapons covering the demon. A closer look revealed that it was just the husk; the body. The snatcher had made its exit, probably on its way to the nearest graveyard to pick up a fresh stiff. I picked up the ends of the leash and twisted them together, frustration boiling in me. I could see my team members set up a teleport trace, but I knew that there was no point. Silvus would not have left a trail. But now it was a different game. We had moved on from legal trap-laying to an all-out hunt. This was more my kind of game.

  I sent out a mental missive to the CCC bulletin centre. The message was an instant all-points alert to all CCC operatives; AJ Silvus was to be apprehended on sight and terminated at the first sign of hostility. I did not have to be careful about bringing him in alive anymore. There would be no trial now. Using a scape against a CCC operative was one of the primal crimes and it earned the offender an instant death penalty. Silvus had made one mistake too many. There would be no going back now. This would be a hunt to the finish. One thought nagged me though. He had mentioned the Wordscapist. I had always considered it the wordsmith equivalent of an old wives’ tale. But with a scape reading of almost 200, Silvus might just have pulled off the insanity he had been spouting. I dismissed the thought. First, I would finish Silvus. And if he was right about the Wordscapist bullshit, I would hunt down that freak too.

  CHAPTER 7

  A Lesson on the Word

  A step to the left

  Another to the right

  Not the one in front though

  It’s a fun dance indeed

  When every step could be your last

  Slick

  I was stuck between a pretty girl who had just tried to kill me, a voice in my head that was trying to give me advice in what appeared to be Scottish, and the prospect of a heavenly meal. I could only hope that I got to finish the meal before anything terrible happened. That was the weirdest conversation I’d ever had. What made it all the weirder had been the voice in my head playing interpreter. “Don’t let on that you’re daft!” “Keep yer gob shut, boy!” “She thinks you’re one of theirs, a true wordsmith! Let her believe what she does; don’t ye ruin it!”

  I had no clue what any of that meant. But then, through the haze, it all made sense. It was like a distinct and parallel awareness was filtering into mine. The gift of the Word, weaving wordscapes, shaping reality…I started finding words to define what was happening to me. I had no clue where it was coming from, but I started understanding who I was and what I was…..I was a wordsmith! And I had just wordsmithed a defence that had almost burned this place down.

  What the hell was a wordsmith? And where was this coming from? I had no clue. But I had to keep the conflict, the questions, all the doubts, for later. This pretty, young girl had proved to be deadlier than anyone I had ever met before. She had thrown something at me that I barely started to recognise, that I had managed to repel through sheer luck. I didn’t know if I’d be able to pull off something like that again. I wouldn’t bet my life on it, that’s for sure. I had to be careful how I played it. Mr. Voice had that part right. (What the hell was the voice about anyway and why was I listening to its advice!) I couldn’t let her know that I wasn’t privy to whatever secret group she thought I was a part of. It helped that I wasn’t one of the ‘bastards from the Guild’, but then I wasn’t sure what other groups she had problems with. I didn’t want my Greenpeace membership earning me another potentially fatal fireball. I walked to the entrance and picked my bag up. I walked back into the deserted shack, again struck by the extent of damage. I found a slightly charred but still serviceable chair, and settled into it. I could feel the warp itching to jump up, almost calling out to me. I could feel the power coursing through me, the words jumping up in my head. Something had happened, something had truly woken up inside me. Was this power linked to the voice? Was this weird gift of the Word, whatever that was, manifested through a voice? Why the hell did it sound Scottish then! I could see the girl moving around inside; she would pop her head out every now and then, as if she were checking on me. I had no clue what to make of her. I think cluelessness pretty much defined my entire state. Well, I hoped the food was all that my friends had led me to believe. I would get a good Goan meal inside me and then deal with this insanity.

  “It’s real enough boy; you’d better brace yourself for all that is to come.”

  There it was again. While calm, the voice spoke a language closer to my own. It’s when it got excitable that it grew a kilt and bagpipes.

  She came back, with the first of many tray-loads. The food was good, and it was plentiful. I dug in, stuffing my face like there was no tomorrow. At this rate, I wasn’t sure there would be one. The seafood was brilliant enough to allow me to
be more philosophical about that. So were the sausages. The meal was perfect and much needed.

  I could see her hovering around, watching me. She kept refilling my beer and got me seconds of whatever I asked for. She was extremely curious, but I guess she was politely trying to make up for her lack of hospitality earlier on. I wanted to talk to her, ask her questions. But I figured now was not the time for it. Or maybe the voice told me so. I didn’t know which thought was just me anymore. Heck, I didn’t even know if the voice was me!

  I finally laid my cutlery down, sated and stuffed. I leaned back, heard the chair creak, and hurriedly straightened up again. I pulled out my cigarettes and lit up. I could see the distaste on the girl’s face, but chose to ignore her. I drew in the smoke and sighed blissfully.

  “So, you didn’t tell me your name.” She offered this with an almost overdone air of casual cheerfulness.

  “True,” I drawled, half sleepily, as I dragged out another blissful lungful of smoke, “I didn’t.”

  She made a face. I could literally see her make the effort of swallowing a retort. “I’m sorry I attacked you,” she offered in a carefully neutral voice, “so can we please put that behind us and talk? We’re all Free wordsmiths here, and we can’t hold on to grudges.” The forced cheer was back. She was cute enough to carry it off, though. I had to give her that.